We are pleased to announce the release of CrawfordTech version 4.7. DTE or Digital Transform Engine, which is the foundation of the CrawfordTech portfolio, encompassing our document transformation and reengineering technology in addition to accessible conversions and other supporting solutions.
Among a variety of new features, we are most excited to announce Responsive HTML with this release.
What is Responsive HTML? Simply put Responsive HTML intelligently “responds” to the device the content is being presented on. Responsive HTML uses a combination of HTML and CSS to resize, hide, shrink, enlarge, or move the content to make it easily readable on any screen (desktops, tablets, and phones).
Up until now, this technology has focused on making websites that user friendly on all devices. While documents have been presented online for quite some time, the preferred or default format has been PDF. However, this format cannot react to the device that it is displayed on and is restricted by many limitations of being a document despite being “portable”. Today, we focus on conveying information and communicating more than simply producing documents. This is where Responsive HTML is essential for modern electronic communications. Enabling presentation of communications without the restrictions of page boundaries, with the added element of being “responsive” that allows the content to flow to the dimensions of any screen.
This capability is also important when it comes to delivering accessible communications. While PDF has been a go-to standard for many organizations looking for the ability to tag and produce accessible communications, we find that HTML tends to be more accessibility-friendly in that it’s not restricted to specific readers or devices. Therefore, HTML tends to be more universally preferred than PDF; enabling more people, even those who are sighted, to benefit from allowing a communication to be read to them.
In our world of transactional communications (as well as marketing and general communications), to achieve responsive HTML output, the communication needs to accommodate this from the very beginning at template creation; or so that is what the composition and CCM providers would lead you to believe. Fortunately for our customers, we at CrawfordTech prefer to defy norms and have developed a way to take existing documents ready for print and reengineer them for responsive HTML output. We can also take the communication even further by layering our accessible technology on top with accessible tags as well as other document reengineering functions to truly “transform” the original document into a modern communication.
While we are excited to showcase Responsive HTML in our DTE 4.7 release, there are additional features enhancements to note as well. A few other new capabilities in DTE 4.7 are:
- The addition of an API for Concatenation so this function can be called by other services.
- Support for Signed PDF on z/OS (IBM Mainframe)
- Indexing update to support Trigger and Field based on a PDF bookmark by its contents.
- Designer Enhancements including added support for triggering on TLE content. We are also providing a wizard for tagging vector graphics as well as an undo feature where adds, edits, and delete operations can be undone in ICF files.
- Accessibility Enhancements including support for A4 paper size in TAF Braille output, nested table support in AutoTagger and support for table borders in Large Print output.
- And so much more!
If you are a customer or partner and would like to learn more about the enhancements in DTE 4.7, it’s not too late to sign up for next week’s webinar on June 5. Product Marketing Manager Stephanie Pieruccini will be joined by professional services and accessibility maven Aimee Ubbink to discuss this release in more detail.
CrawfordTech DTE releases new features and enhancements every 6 months to best serve our partners, our customers, and stay aligned with industry trends. Each release contains 200 or more updates as requested by our product management team, our customers, our sales team, and our partners. And we’re always open to hear from you.
